Newt Gingrich "puzzled" by smartphone

To call this a "cell phone" or a "handheld computer" fails to capture the change that has taken place. It is a change in kind, not just a change in scale, and just as drivers of the earliest cars called them "horseless carriages", our language has not caught up.

So having failed for several days to come up with an adequate term for the device we call a "cell phone," we want to open the discussion up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think we should name it, and we'll feature the best ones in a future newsletter.

I only apply the same logic to “cell phone” that you do to your other examples:

• First came the laptop – then came the DVD playing abilities.
• It was a game console before it was a Netflix box
• It was a cellular telephone before it was “not only a cell phone.”

We refer to all of these things by their original purpose, regardless of the other features it acquires.

Nothing else will catch as a name until the original is no longer adequate to describe the object. Smart-phone almost had it I think, but with almost everyone having one, and so few people having the old “dumb” phones (*cough*my wife*cough*) , I hear most people just calling them “cell phone”, “pone”, or “mobile”.

The real question is what icon do you use to represent a phone when a phone can look like anything?

Modern mobile phones don’t make use of cellular technology… Unless your smartphone is using an analog signal (in which case, I hope you have good lungs, so that you can shout sufficiently loud to be heard when you are far away from a tower!)

Well, the area served by each tower is still called a ‘cell’ (even in the UK where we call them mobile phones), and the complicated part of the technology that had to be solved to create the first cell phones was the hand-off between different towers, and that still exists, so I think calling them cellphones is acceptable.

I hate to admit it, but he does kinda have a point. I use my iPhone all the time and yet go for days without a phone call on it.
“Computer” has kind of the same problem when applied to non-business devices. Unlike the commercial mainframes I used to do programming on, consumer ones do almost no computing at all. It’s all about moving data from one place to another and displaying it. No batch accounting applications to be seen.
We do need better terminology to describe these relatively new appliances. But we don’t need Noot to approve our nomenclature for us.

So, you are saying that the CPU speed in your system does not matter, since almost no computations take place on your local machine?

Personally, most “business use” computers are more likely to be thin client style “cloud computing”, aka document processing, etc, while most non-business gamers are wanting their computer to do more and faster computing then ever.

I think that the name “computer” works just fine for personal computers.

As for the cell phones, you have either “Smartphones” or cell-phones.

I want to ask Newt, if you car does more then drive (like play music, or cool the air inside), it is more then a car?

Sounds like the opening moves of some plan to “frame the conversation”. I kept waiting for “But there’s a darker side to this limitless potential, and with great power comes great responsibility.” Check back in a year’s time to see if he’s progressed to mandatory tracking collars yet.

Of all his flaws (and he has many), pretty much everything I’ve read seems to agree Newt is actually, genuinely fascinated with technology and the future and the potential it holds. Of all the candidates to make grandiose space claims, he’s the only one who would have at least tried to make it happen, for example.

Indeed, he might sound very forward on technology, if one was not familiar with Bond films or Stephen Colbert.

But when Colbert realized Gingrich’s electromagnetic talk and and his lunar colony idea was from Bond’s villains and not Bond, he flipped his analogy.
“It’s occurred to me, all those schemes are from the villains,” he said. “Gingrich isn’t Bond, he’s Blofeld!

…Don’t you think a man who is “fascinated by technology” would know what a SMARTPHONE, of all freakin’ things, is?! I mean come on. The fact that you believe the crap you just wrote after watching this video is kind of sad.

i believe i did hear that, unless… wait, what’s it called when you think you remember hearing something, but actually you totally just made it up? not cryptomnesia, that’s when you think you made it up but you actually heard it somewhere

Personal digital assistant was a term widely used long in advance of Deus Ex’s release, and even longer before the year Deus Ex is set. Hardly prescient. Actually rather retrograde, if you think about it.

Mobile terminal. (Or would it be mobile terminus if you’re British?) Whether you use it as a telephone, for internet access, for lightweight computing, or for a combination of the above, it’s a terminal. Whether it’s operating in a cellular mode, tethered to wifi, or even connected to a satellite, it’s mobile. Thus, mobile terminal.

A bit of a mouthful, but “mobterm” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Of course, I also named my PC “electroni-box”, so I don’t have the best track record with these sort of things.

Harlan Ellison has been here already:http://www.islets.net/essays/glassteat.html
One could probably get away with reapplying this put down to smart phones by writing caustic app reviews, or something, but it would have to be backed up with a significant amount of work as was done by Mr. Ellison for his project. He offered a lot of criticism, sure, but he also clearly watched a heck of a lot of television in the process of doing so.

The correct term for an electrified guitar is “guitar.” The correct term for electronic mail is “mail.” And the correct term for an intelligent phone is “phone.” Add modifiers for the obsolete variants: acoustic guitar, physical mail, voice-only phone.

Disagree. Some people buy them, use them constantly and never make a phone call. So why on earth would you call it a phone? Voice communication occupies only a small percentage of the materials, technology and resource usage of a modern smartphone.

I would comment “If you’re so interested in making government and society better and more productive, why didn’t you focus on that while you were in government, instead of focusing on excoriating Clinton for having an extramarital affair while blatantly extramaritally boinking the current Mrs. Gingrich?”

So many bad puns came to mind that I had a brain burp and couldn’t think for a moment. So, since I am sure that there are many others who will have a ton of fun with puns on this (and which I am going to continue enjoy reading), I’m going with a serious suggestion.

Is this “Newt Gingrich” guy for real, or is this an elaborate Troll or a comedy act ( like Stephen Colbert)

I cannot believe that anybody is that stupid that they know what a smartphone is, but doesnt know its called a smartphone. Really?
Even his supposed name “Newt Gingrich” sounds made up. Sounds too surreal and hillbilly’ish to be a real name.

Because lets be perfectly honest here, who would vote for somebody named “Newt Gingrich”?

Is this “Newt Gingrich” guy for real, or is this an elaborate Troll or a comedy act ( like Stephen Colbert)
You could ask the same question about a large fraction of our politicians. But alas, he really is a elected politician with a long career behind him.

It’s a calculated attempt at “folksiness”, pretending to be a regular guy so people will like him. Once you get to know him, you realize he’s a sanctimonious weasel. It’s not an unusual political animal.

Of course he knows it’s often called a “smartphone”, and a “cellphone”, but he’s trying to make a point. It’s a revolutionary technology, it’s put networked video cameras in the hands of half the population (so it’s a lot harder for police to get away with things unrecorded), it’s running tools to keep people constantly updated about what their friends are up to, and to keep people who aren’t your friends constantly updated about what you’re up to, it’s got more computing power than supercomputers did when he was first harassing Bill Clinton and faster data connections than an average university did back then, it’s got music-player and music-distribution technology that helped trash the big music studios’ business model, can store a recent copy of Wikipedia and access the rest of it as needed.

It doesn’t yet have an intergalactic version of the Electric Thumb application, but you can definitely get an app to show “Don’t Panic” in big friendly letters on the front.

I am an American, and I want to assure you that Newt Gingrich is not a real person. He is a comedian prankster. All the news and stuff you might see about him on the web are just jokes. He is kind of like Rick Santorum, Steven Colbert, and Michele Bachmann, just hilarious made up American jokes.

It is always hilarious when non-Americans read our joke news and think they are real. Do you really think one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations with one of the longest running democracies could really descend into the kind of stupid that these pranksters pretend is real?

Ha ha, Americans are so funny and totally don’t have a batshit insane political class hell bent on running the nation into the ground. You can go ahead and keep on respecting the Americans. We are totally worth respecting.

I had the impression that being British means that you have to hand half your paycheck to a terrorist because EUROPE!, you’re not allowed to leave your home because health and safety and you have a one in four chance of being murdered by a Polish immigrant on any given day. I haven’t observed the nicer-pretending.

I am an American, and I want to assure you that Newt Gingrich is not a real person. He is a comedian prankster. All the news and stuff you might see about him on the web are just jokes. He is kind of like Rick Santorum, Steven Colbert, and Michele Bachmann, just hilarious made up American jokes.

It is always hilarious when non-Americans read our joke news and think they are real. Do you really think one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations with one of the longest running democracies could really descend into the kind of stupid that these pranksters pretend is real?

Ha ha, Americans are so funny and totally don’t have a batshit insane political class hell bent on running the nation into the ground. You can go ahead and keep on respecting the Americans. We are totally worth respecting.

And so, Kangaroo loudly proclaimed, “I can’t send Hare in search of anything!”
“You can guru, you can!” shouted Newt.
“You can send him with Owl.”
But Owl had gone to sleep.
Newt knew too much to be stopped by so small a problem
“You can take him in your pouch.”
But alas, Hare was much too big to fit into
Kangaroo’s pouch.

I prefer “terminal.” Iain Banks uses the term in the Culture novels to refer to each citizens link to the Culture, often in the form of a piece of jewelry or a phone-like device in their pocket. They can contact the Minds (AIs) that run the Culture, call for help, retrieve information with their terminal.

Or better still, name it after one of the Culture Ships. “New Toy” would be obvious, but “Subtle Shift in Emphasis” also works. “Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints” is one to keep for the companies that make them.

Has anyone noticed that the industry doesn’t actually call them “cell phones” or their own service “cellular” anymore, in favor of the more vague “mobile”? And among the mobile phone hardware wonks, the phones are known as “handsets”.

i figured it was an homage to Shadowrun, a cyberpunk tabletop rpg which used the term for the same thing in its second edition in 1992! maybe the first edition too (1989), but definitely in the second. and Shadowrun probably got it from some obscure cyberpunk novel.

I’m with Charlie Stross in thinking that the appropriate term is “glowing rectangle”. As in, “I’m sitting here in the dark, poking my glowing rectangle, and then I hold my glowing rectangle up to the side of my head and shout at it”.

I think what Newt doesn’t realize is that most terms we use for things like cars, movies, etc…; are slang terms that were use so commonly they became part of our regular language. So I say we call it whatever the hell we want and eventually no one will care until the day we have to explain to our children what a phone is.